The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
In modern society, automobiles are the most common means of transportation and the number of people using them has been increased. Due to advances in automotive technology, there are many changes in life such as facilitating the long-distance movement, and making life easier, than in the past.
As for the vehicle, a variety of electronics such as a hands-free device, a GPS receiver, a Bluetooth device, and high-pass device has been developed for the convenience of the driver. Among the automotive technology fields, electric and electronic fields are increasingly creating the new value.
Also, in recent years, there is trend in the car-sharing in which a number of people shares vehicles and for the car-sharing, a user authentication process is desired to inhibit or prevent the vehicle theft.
The user authentication technique is mainly performed a primitive authentication method in which an authentication device receives a password from a user through a keypad and matches the password with a pre-stored password, thereby authenticating a user. However, in recent years, due to the development of scientific technology, technologies for identifying or authenticating users using biologic features such as gene traits, fingerprints, voices, veins, facial features, and irises have come into commercial use for more accurate authentication.
Among these methods, a method of using biometric information of the user such as user's fingerprint may be most frequently used as the authentication method.
The authentication method of using biometric information is performed such that a user stores user biometric information in a vehicle or a server in advance, and when the user wants to use the vehicle, user biometric information detected by the vehicle is matched with the biometric information stored in the server, thereby completing the user authentication.
But, in forms of the above mentioned method, since the authentication process is performed by matching biometric information received from the vehicle with biometric information stored in the server by a one-to-one method, it may be possible to quickly transmit a result of the authentication process when a server does not have a lot of user information. However, we have discovered that when the server has a lot of user information, it may take a large amount of time to perform the authentication process.
We have also discovered that when fingerprint authentication process is performed in a state in which fingerprint information is stored in a vehicle door, there may be problems caused by the door handle theft